Red Wings still plan on having Alfredsson back

Detroit’s Daniel Alfredsson (11) reacts as he watches his shot go past Tampa Bay Lightning goalie Ben Bishop for a goal last season. Alfredsson is set to begin skating this week to test his back to see if he can play one more season in the NHL. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)

“The plan for Alfie is we’ll go to camp Sept. 18 and probably the week before, after he’s had a chance to skate every day for the first couple of weeks in September, then we’ll talk heading into camp,” Wings general manager Ken Holland said.

Alfredsson seems to be getting geared up to play another season, or at least see if he’s capable of doing so.

Last week a tweet from Szymon Szemberg, the COO of Europe’s Champions Hockey League, said Alfredsson is planning to skate this week to see how his back feels before deciding if he returns for another season, which would be his 19th in the NHL.

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Another tweet from Szemberg read, “@DAlfredsson11 said that if he plays one more year, it will be with @DetroitRedWings. No other options.”

“My take is we’re probably going to try to do something with Alfie,” Holland said. “When he was healthy, he was valuable.”

After appearing in 68 regular season games, Alfredsson played in just three of the five games in the opening round playoff series with Boston and didn’t record a point.

He had 18 goals and 31 assists in the regular season.

“I don’t look at Alfie thinking he’s going to play 82 games,” Holland said. “When you’ve got (Gustav) Nyquist, (Tomas) Tatar, (Tomas) Jurco, (Luke) Glendening and (Riley) Sheahan, if we can get a certain amount of games out of him, we would feel like he would be a real positive addition.”

Alfredsson, who’ll turn 42 in December, signed a one-year deal last year worth $3.5 million plus $2 million in bonuses he earned.

He’ll have to take a significant pay cut in order to sign with Detroit since the team has just under $5.3 million in salary cap space left and still has a deal to work out with defenseman Danny DeKeyser.

“At the end of the day we want to see him skate her every day for 2-3 weeks and then we’ll see how he feels,” Holland said.

This and that

Holland said he plans to talk with DeKeyser this week about a new contract. DeKeyser is the last restricted free agent left for the team to sign. His salary was $950,000 each of the last two seasons.

Holland also said that they’re not looking to sign any depth forwards or defensemen before training camp begins, believing what’s out there isn’t better than what’s on the roster already or in their system.

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